Photographer: Bryan Mitchell

Growing up a boy in Baltimore can cost you.

Male children who are raised in below-median income families in Baltimore earn 1.4 percent less in adult family income for each year that they're exposed to the neighborhood. That means a man who spent his entire childhood -- 20 years -- in Baltimore would earn about 28 percent less relative to the national average as an adult.

That gives Baltimore the worst ranking among the 100 largest counties in the U.S. While a penalty exists for girls, too, it's less substantial, amounting to 0.3 percent in lost earnings per childhood year.

There are pockets across the U.S. "which seem to produce especially poor outcomes for boys," Harvard economists Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren wrote in a new study. "Areas with high degrees of segregation and sprawl generate particularly negative outcomes for boys relative to girls."

Below-median income boys fared especially poorly in Wayne County in Michigan, home to Detroit, New Haven in Connecticut, and Pima in Arizona as well.  

Economic opportunity diverges sharply by place throughout the country, with some localities boosting future earnings substantially, while being born and raised in others comes at a cost. That disparity has caught the attention of politicians, including Hillary Clinton, who cited Chetty's work at a Center for American Progress panel in March and who, according to the Boston Globe, has been personally briefed by the economist. 

The opportunity divide has been showcased in Baltimore, in particular. The city erupted into violent riots following peaceful protests after Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man, died in police custody in what has been ruled a homicide. 

"If you have impoverished communities that have been stripped away of opportunity, where children are born into abject poverty" with little parental guidance and a lack of investment, problems like Baltimore's unrest are bound to happen, President Barack Obama said in an April 28 press conference. "If we think that we're just going to send the police to do the dirty work of containing the problems that arise there without as a nation and as a society saying what can we do to change those communities, to help lift up those communities and give those kids opportunity, then we're not going to solve this problem."

Chetty and Hendren arrived at their conclusions by studying more than five million families who moved across large counties and commuting zones. They find that children who move to better neighborhoods at younger ages fare better when their income is measured in their 20's, with each year of exposure to the higher-mobility community leading to higher earnings down the road.

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